What Is a World?
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ac­know­ledg­ments Even though it puts into question the equation of the world with the spatial extensiveness of the globe, a book that takes as its subject something as large as the world and literature’s relation to the world is necessarily the product of intellectual conversations that have stretched across the globe. Special thanks to Jonathan Culler, Elizabeth Grosz, and David Wang Der-­wei for reading the manuscript, Benedict Anderson and Caroline Hau for invaluable feedback on the epilogue, Wendy Larson for her insightful comments on chapter 7, and Zachary Manfredi for his careful reading of chapters 4 and 5. Peter Fenves and Simon Gikandi ­ were exemplary manuscript reviewers. This book is stronger be- cause of their incisive comments. Nuruddin Farah and Amitav Ghosh patiently answered factual questions about their writing. Earlier versions of chapters ­ were presented at the Beijing Foreign Lan- guages University, Binghamton University, Birkbeck, University of London, the University of British Columbia, Cornell University, Ehwa Woman’s Uni- Florida State University, Georgetown University, Goldsmiths, University of ­versity, London, the University of Hong Kong, Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Manchester, National Chung-­hsing University, National Taiwan University, the National University of Singapore, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Oregon at Eugene, Oxford University, Peking University, the University of Pennsylvania, Seoul National University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Stanford Univer- sity, Thammasat University, the University of Washington at Seattle, and the University of Zürich. I would like to thank my interlocutors on these occa- sions, especially Samuel Weber, Susannah Gottlieb, Costas Douzinas, J. Hillis Miller, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Rita Felski, Ramon Saldivar, Dai ­Jinhua, Franco Moretti, David Damrosch, Haun Saussy, Annu Jalais, Elizabeth Anker, Natalie Melas, Robert Young, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Sneja Gunew, Ankhi Mukherjee, Elleke Boehmer, Alessia Ricciardi, Vicente Rafael, Lau- rie Sears, Walter Cohen, Neil Saccamano, Leslie Adelson, Robin Goodman, Vinay Dharwadker, Susan Stanford Friedman, Robert Guay, Jini Kim Watson,